Georgia team wins Fort Mill Invitational

Stratford Academy of Macon, Ga., became the first out-of-state team to win the Fort Mill Invitational at Manchester Meadows in its five-year history.

Just getting to the tournament championship wasn't easy for Stratford , beginning with a 5-hour bus ride on Saturday.

Once they arrived in Rock Hill, they had to play two gamesin quick succession. They beat Charlotte's Covenant Day School 2-0 at 2 p.m. and tied 1-1 with Marvin Ridge High at 8 p.m. Marvin Ridge is the defending North Carolina 3A state champion.

The Stratford team then played in the championship game at noon Sunday.

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Despite three games in less than 24 hours, Stratford beat Ashley Ridge High School of Summerville 3-0 in a dominating performance.

The Stratford Academy Eagles are now 7-0-1 this season.

Head coach James Jordan said he could tell his girls were tired.

"It was showing on the field," he said. "We came out flat. We did well to grind it out."

Stratford allowed Ashley Ridge just one shot on goal with that come late in the second half.

The Lady Eagles controlled the ball throughout the game and kept Ashley Ridge's defense spread thin.

Stratford's sophomore midfielder Elizabeth Fuller scored 22 minutes into the game to put Stratford up at an early 1-0.

Both teams came out of the half with 40 minutes of soccer ahead of them and unsure of what was ahead.

Ashley Ridge did everything it could to get into the flow of an offense, but defensively, they could never stop Stratford long enough.

At the 51:28 mark in the game, Stratford scored its second goal on a free kick when senior midfielder Lauren Hale put the ball in the back of the net to make it 2-0.

By then, Ashley Ridge had lost all the fight it could muster.

Stratford scored once more seven minutes later, when sophomore forward Allie Hale put the game out of reach at 3-0 on a free kick.

The Lady Eagles keepers could have taken a nap and not worried about a score as much activity as they saw in the game.

Stratford Academy pulled starting keeper Sarah Dennis with 20 minutes left in the game and replaced her with freshman Taylor Mathias, who made the only save of the game the Lady Eagles would need.

No local teams finished in the top three of the tournament as Lexington High School beat Clover High School 2-0 in the third-place game. In the fifth-place game, Fort Mill High beat Rock Hill High 3-0 and in the seventh-place game, Nation Ford High and Northwestern High battled to a 0-0 tie, but the Lady Falcons of Nation Ford were awarded the seventh place finish because they were the higher seed and didn't lose, so Nation Ford kept seventh place, and Northwestern kept eighth.